MnemonicBump

I meant the comment above me, not the Vonnegut quote. Dude was pretty cosmopolitan

That is a very narrow view of history. Not incorrect, necessarily, but also not the full picture. This is only correct if you’re looking at history from that very western-centric lens that starts with Egypt (for some reason), then goes into Greece, Rome, and then 1-2-skip a few, and a neat little line into the Renaissance and then the “age of exploration”. But that wasn’t most of the world, that was pretty much just Europe.

Send me a screenshot.

Fine. Sure. A few starting points since you asked in good faith: For historical examples of non-market/cooperative organization, see Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons (1990), which documents real communities managing shared resources without privatization or central coercion. David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years also covers many societies that operated through reciprocity/obligation rather than modern monetary exchange. I can point you to some great podcasts if you want. For historical examples, Revolutionary Catalonia (1936–39) and numerous Indigenous communal systems demonstrate large-scale cooperative production/distribution outside traditional capitalist structures. See the previous Debt: the First 5000 years and just SO MUCH research. Maybe Orwell's Homage to Catalonia would be a good place to look. My library point wasn’t “libraries are a whole society,” but that they demonstrate distribution based on shared access/need rather than direct purchase can function effectively. Public institutions already allocate many goods/services this way. As for undesirable labor, societies don’t need to choose between “profit motive” and “slavery.” Additional leisure, prestige, reduced hours, or enhanced benefits can incentivize difficult work just as effectively as wages. Automation can also reduce much of the repetitive labor currently done purely because it’s cheaper than innovating away the need for it. I’m not claiming a moneyless society would be simple or easy—just that the idea humans can ONLY organize through profit incentives is historically and empirically false.

We did not just drop six nukes on Iran

I didn't cite sources because the literal decades and decades of refutations to your arguments already exist. But I will leave you with this: Why do libraries work?

Why do you assume that we'd *need* correctional officers in a world without money?

On the contrary, I don't trust any medical profession that is in it for the money.

Like, half of the jobs you listed would be automated out pretty quick in a world without money, out of the other ones, a few would be rendered obsolete without profit motive (pretty sure we can find something better for batteries than lithium, and why would you need someone scanning groceries if there was no money?). What's left can be rotated out or done by lottery, and those doing the undesirable labor get to have more luxury items or whatever. It's not hard to imagine, people have been doing it for centuries.

Great! Thanks! You've just *doomed* us to get the Linux Saturn, which will be appreciated by some, but ultimately fail against SuperWindows and Windows 64. After that we'll get something beautiful, the Linux Dreamcast, but it will be too little too late, as just a few months later, Apple releases the MacStation2, which most people buy because it has a DVD player built in, and the Linux Dreamcast kind of just dies... 25 years later, and Linux is making Linux Classics compilations and new games starring Tux for the WindowsSwitch2.

Please go back and read the several different times I say exactly that in my previous comments. We don’t disagree about that. We just seem to disagree that people who do use “-ism” labels can also be helpful people.

Then, I don’t know what to say to you. Having conversations with low information people with yield low information results. That is in no way relevant to what we’re talking about. You might as well have said “Yeah, but lots of people I know have never even heard the word ‘fission’ before” while in a thread talking about nuclear science.

That word only exists in English? That’s weird, I wonder then how so many people from non-Engliah speaking countries learned about it then?

“Its 2026 and in my third week here on North Sentinel Island, I’ve discovered that, despite a century of a world super power using the word ‘socialist’ in the name of their country, somehow these people have never heard the word, ‘socialism’”. That’s how you sound. Once again, I don’t give a shit what people call themselves, so if they are good guys, they are on the same side as me, because that’s the side I’ve chosen? People claiming to be socialists but they’re not actually socialists, then they’re not socialists. That’s not a bad guy/good guy thing, that’s just how words work. Again, there are incredible people who have been vital to the socialist causes who would never call themselves socialist, and there are no problems with that. My problem is with you specifically. The label isn’t my agenda beyond just trying to get you to stop caring about what someone.calls themselves and start caring about what they do.

I think you’re way too hung up on labels. Why do you give a shit what somebody else calls themselves? Maybe you’ve just been meeting socialists that know you have a weird anti"-ism" thing, so they just don’t use that word and instead describe ideas to you (which is a fairly common tactic to take around somebody that is slightly unhinged). Nobody said everybody needs to be any kind of anything. There are lots of helpful people to socialist causes who don’t consider themselves to be socialists. That’s called critical support is is highly valued.

I feel like you’ve interacted with too many socialists online. That is not my irl experience at all. In fact, your last paragraph there does describe most irl socialists.

Those encyclopedia sets are worth their weight in gold. You shouldn’t expect digital services to always be around, you know?